Apple

Regular readers of my blog and attendees of TMC expos no doubt know Ken Camp. Ken is very knowledgeable in the field of information technology with special expertise in communications and security. He has written books, articles, spoken at shows and is a recognized thought leader in the blogoshere and beyond.

Ken does all this and is also the State Enterprise Architect for the State of Washington -- with a special focus on security.

Ken has impressed me for a number of reasons and perhaps one of the most amazing things he does is travel to industry events on his own dime. He does this because he seems to truly love the industry, being involved with it and sharing his thoughts with others via his books, internet writings and speaking assignmets.

Having said that, Ken is looking to change roles and I can think of few people who are capable as he is.

I don't want to predict a disaster but having Deutsche Telecom acquire Sprint doesn't make sense from the perspective of all the different network types these companies use. Sprint uses CDMA, Deutsche Telecom's T-Mobile uses GSM and Nextel uses iDEN. Oh, don't forget to add WiMAX to this mix.

It is unclear how many of the Sprint/Nextel problems were do to management problems as opposed to having to deal with two disparate network types.

Adding yet another technology to the mix seems like something only a masochist would want to do.

Oh, did I mention Merrill Lynch predicted that Deutsche Telecom will acquire Sprint? Merrill has a point from a market share perspective.

Last summer I wrote about by trip to Redmond to visit Microsoft and more specifically my thoughts on when the iPhone will get ActiveSync if ever. Here is an excerpt:

As part of the Redmond software giant’s mobility strategy, Jeff [Jeff Ressler, Director, Exchange Marketing] mentioned that ActiveSync has been licensed some device manufacturers which, of course, means the power of unified communications can be enjoyed on-the-go. I mentioned some rumors I heard about the iPhone supporting ActiveSync soon and Jeff told me he couldn’t comment. Perhaps this meant that there are serious talks with Apple in the works – he didn’t say they aren’t talking after all.

I was traveling yesterday and I didn't get a chance to communicate with my blog readers in the detail I would normally like to give. This morning I decided to share all the news that caught my eye from last night and this morning.

NEC VT800

The first up is the the new NEC VT800 which I thought was interesting as it is a network-ready video projector for around $1,000. Apparently the Ethernet port just manages the device... Too bad -- I thought for sure you could run presentations over your LAN with this nifty addition.

Hopefully this will change in the future and NEC will see fit to have this or a future device IP communications enabled so you could have one way video presentations from remote locations.

AT&T is making a major telecom investment in many areas of its business. The telecom giant cites the explosion of high-speed networks, data consuming devices and the move to IP as the reason for this investment.

The money is being spent to become a larger global player as well as a big provider of utility computing services.

Where will the company be spending money?

Subsea Fiber: Expect the company to expand capacity to area of the world experiencing economic growth such as Asia and the Middle East.

MPLS Routers: The company will add a number of these throughout the world in order to ensure there is proper capacity in areas of rapid business growth.

Metro Ethernet: The company will invest in a manner which allows it to have such services available in 39 countries.

DSL: Investments will allow AT&T to provide this service in 21 countries.

As AT&T gets more involved in the utility computing market, I expect them to butt heads with Sun, Amazon and Google. Google is a past foe - Amazon and Sun are new ones.

While a year ago the cable companies were eating the lunch of AT&T and Verizon, there has been a rapid about-face in the market which has been fueled by the wireless arms of both LECS, IPTV and well as international expansion.

I believe the cable companies will have to do something soon to be able to compete effectively in emerging markets.

In all, this news is fantastic for the telecom market as AT&T is spending 33 percent more than last year and double what they spent in 2006.

It will be great to see these investments allow AT&T to can overseas and whether it can compete effectively against other utility computing players in the market.